A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by KHALED HOSSEINI

Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Books
Released May 22, 2007

A BOOK REVIEW
by ANDREA MIDDENDORF

In his first novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini created an instant classic, and he has done it again with A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this much-anticipated second novel, Hosseini’s sharp, insightful prose has only gotten better. Like The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is set against the backdrop of a war-torn Afghanistan from the days before the Soviet invasion, through the Taliban’s reign of terror, to after September 11th and the reconstruction. Themes of violence, hope, faith, fear, and the power of human endurance resonate throughout the novel.

The novel follows the lives of Mariam and Laila, two women whose lives start out vastly different, but are thrown together through the circumstance of war. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman in the town of Herat. For the first fifteen years of her life, Mariam lives with her mother in a kolba on a hill north of Herat, until her mother dies, and she is married off to Rasheed, a shoe-maker from Kabul who is much older than she. Mariam follows her new husband to Kabul and begins her new life there. Laila is born and raised in Kabul and lives in the same neighborhood as Mariam and Rasheed, but they are on the periphery of her life until tragedy strikes Laila’s life during the period between the Soviet invasion and the Taliban’s reign.

The relationship between Mariam and Laila is a fascinating dichotomy of mother/daughter, sister/friend. In the beginning of their relationship, there is a lot of tension as Mariam sees Laila as a threat, as someone who will displace her; but the two women soon band together under the tyranny of both Rasheed and the Taliban. Hosseini does an excellent job of portraying just how limited women’s rights were under the Taliban. The treatment, or mistreatment, of women in Afghanistan, is one of the themes of this book, one that comes to the forefront when the Taliban comes to power and announces all the rules that women must follow or suffer a variety of punishments, anything from a beating to being stoned to death. The reader, especially a western reader, experiences a visceral reaction when reading the Taliban list of rules. But rather than forcing his readers to wallow in the harshness of this existence, Hosseini threads the narrative with a sense of hope and perseverance. In Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns ,we see a pair of women, who, rather than bow under the heavy boot of intolerance and discrimination, flow with it, never letting it break them, and in the end, they survive.

Visit Khaled Hosseini’s website.

Andrea Middendorf lives and plays in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. She has a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Minnesota, and has so many books she has to keep buying bookshelves, but now she is running out of wall space. Andrea is an aspiring writer with a serious caffeine addiction, working on short stories and a full-length novel, with a bit of poetry sprinkled in here and there.


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